8. How They Keep Romanticising Her Abusive Relationship
Warner Bros.
Recently - in the comics at least - a real effort has been made to disassociate Harley Quinn from the Joker. Harley's got a girlfriend in Poison Ivy, hates the Joker with a burning passion, and is very much over the purple-clad clown in every sense of the word. The part of her life where she was with Mister J isn't looked upon fondly - it's remembered for being the abusive relationship that it was.
That hasn't stopped fans and studios alike from misreading the relationship entirely, however. Suicide Squad presented an utterly painful dynamic where Harley and Joker were very much in love with each other, and it's one that will, ostensibly, be further mined when the team that brought you the Hangover make a rom-com revolving around the pair. Blurgh.
It's just wrong. It's tacky, and it's wrong. And despite the aforementioned efforts to distance the character from her synonymy with the Clown Prince, it's an element DC keep returning to. Harley is and has been more than her relationship for many years now. Why is that so difficult to translate off the page?
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
